There is a particular image that stays with you from the Soul of Vietnam Festival’s Runway on the Waterfront: Vietnamese áo dài against the backdrop of Victoria’s Inner Harbour, the mountains behind, the water in front, the crowd pressing close along the edges of the stage. It is not an image you would have predicted. It is exactly the right one.
The fashion show, a part of the festival’s program this year, brought together Vietnamese designers and local Victoria talent on a single waterfront stage. The result was a show that felt less like a showcase and more like a conversation: between tradition and contemporaneity, between Vietnamese heritage and Canadian design sensibility, between what fashion can be in Vietnam and what it can be in British Columbia.
The Vietnamese designers
Tran Thien Khanh arrived in Victoria carrying one of the most recognizable aesthetic signatures in contemporary Vietnamese fashion. His áo dài collections, inspired by the ceremonial vocabulary of Vietnam’s imperial royal courts, have been shown internationally and have dressed contestants for both the Miss World Organization and the Miss Grand International Organization. His work is not minimalist. It is considered, embellished and entirely deliberate, the kind of design that commands the room it enters.
He chose to bring it to a waterfront stage in British Columbia.
Tran Phuong Hoa, founder of Eleven S, brought more than a decade of bridal fashion expertise to the runway. Her collections sit at the intersection of international bridal elegance and Vietnamese artistry, built on the conviction that Vietnamese brides deserve designs that carry both cultural weight and contemporary refinement. Bringing that work to a waterfront stage in Victoria extended its reach well beyond the bridal showroom, placing it in front of an audience that included many people encountering Vietnamese bridal fashion for the first time.
The local voices
Hidden Dart and Style Me Up, both local to the city, brought their own creative perspectives to the stage, creating a lineup that placed Vietnamese heritage design in direct conversation with the designers and stylists who call the same streets home.
The decision to structure the show this way reflects something important about what the Soul of Vietnam Festival is trying to do. It is not a Vietnamese event that happens to take place in Victoria. It is a Vietnamese event that is part of Victoria, one that invites the city’s own creative community to participate rather than simply observe. The runway made that invitation visible.
What it adds up to
Vietnamese fashion has a complex relationship with international visibility. The áo dài is one of the most recognizable national garments in the world and simultaneously one of the least represented in the contexts where fashion is taken seriously as a creative discipline. Designers like Tran Thien Khanh and Tran Phuong Hoa are part of a generation working to change that, not by abandoning what makes Vietnamese fashion Vietnamese, but by insisting that it belongs on every stage that matters.
Ship Point is not a conventional fashion venue. It is a working waterfront that belongs to everyone who uses it. That is precisely what made it the right setting for a show like this one. The audience at Runway on the Waterfront included people who had never seen a Vietnamese fashion show, who may not have known what áo dài was before that afternoon, who left with a different understanding of what Vietnamese creativity looks like. Paired with local designers and stylists who gave the show a distinctly Victorian identity, the result was something that felt genuinely new.
That is usually when fashion does its best work. Not when it confirms what you already expected. When it shows you something you hadn’t thought to look for.
The Soul of Vietnam Festival is organized by the Soul of Vietnam Foundation.
